What’s the Price of a Life? Society Hazards a Guess

Almost every day, some new study comes out establishing a tenuous link between some everyday behavior--say, drinking coffee--and an increased risk of death. After hearing about one of these studies on the radio, a friend asked me why scientists spend so much money on “death prevention.” After all, she said, “It’s the one thing we know for sure we can’t prevent.”

Still, people seem to think that everything possible should be done to save whatever lives we can, whenever possible. They say: “You can’t put a price on life.” But the truth is, societies do put a price on life. To see how, all you have to do is look at how societies respond to various kinds of life-threatening risks.

For example, when President Clinton recently gave $1 billion for improved airport security after the TWA Flight 800 crash, I cheered. As a fearful flier myself, I figure I can use all the help I can get. But I also know that dozens of 747s worth of children throughout the world die every day due to easily preventable causes like hunger and disease. The price of lives lost on airliners is clearly higher (according to powers that be) than lives lost to simple hunger.

Or take lives lost to high-profile killers like cigarettes, handguns, booze and cars. We clearly value our freedom to use them more than we value the lives that are lost. A purely numerical death prevention policy would probably ban them all outright. In fact, psychologists know that people generally accept risks they impose on themselves far better than they accept risks foisted on them by other people. (Don’t put additives in my food, but don’t make me wear a motorcycle helmet, either.)

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And they tend to worry about exotic risks more than familiar ones: Parents worry about drug abuse and abduction by strangers when hundreds of times more children die each year from choking, burns, falls, drowning. They worry about low-level exposure to asbestos while killers like suicide are practically ignored.

In other words, they value lives lost to self-imposed hazards less than they value the lives of innocents.

If truth be told, even the experts don’t know how to measure the severity of threats to life very well. It’s an art that takes a lot more than adding up numbers.

Physicist Hal Lewis, author of “Technological Risk,” tells a story about several General Motors executives who were sitting on a commercial airliner before takeoff when the captain announced that the passengers had already made it through the most dangerous part of the trip: driving to the airport.

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The GM execs, however, knew that most auto fatalities involve drunken teenage boys--a population that was not represented on their plane. “The people on airlines are usually middle-aged business men and women,” said Lewis. “They are not accident-prone drivers.”

Comparing only good-driver statistics, the GM executives were able to prove (not surprisingly) that driving might indeed be safer than flying--at least for short trips.

In fact, Lewis points out, numbers alone would suggest that the most dangerous way to travel is walking--because more pedestrians than drivers are killed each year. “If you want to save the lives of pedestrians,” he said, “you should put them all in cars.”

Of course, he admits, these numbers don’t always mean much. “These comparative risks can get a little silly,” he said.

Comparisons don’t always make sense because so many complicating factors come into play, including human psychology and correlations that may have nothing to do with cause. Statisticians have shown, for example, that the single most important health risk for a man is not being married. This finding prompted researchers Bernard Cohen and I-Sing Lee to write in Health Physics some years ago that society should invest in programs such as government-organized computer dating services. The real experts at setting a price on life, of course, are courts and insurance companies. “The value of human life is known better to lawyers than to most people,” said Lewis. “It’s about a million dollars a person.” That’s the amount of life insurance people tend to buy, and the amount that juries tend to award in wrongful death cases. No one buys $500 worth of life insurance. Or $5 billion.

“One thing is sure,” said Lewis. “When people say you can’t put a price on life, they’re wrong. We do it every day.”